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Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. Here, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and Oliver Sacks tells us why.--From publisher description.… (more)
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There's the man who got struck by lightning, and then a few weeks afterwards suddenly found that the creation of new music was flowing through
I came away from the book with the sense that music is more than we think it is - far more than a series of sounds. It's something that different people understand on such different levels (regardless of education and training), and something of extraordinary power. It's as if music is already out there, existing on its own without human intervention, and it's only our own varying perception that enables us to access or understand it.
I found Musicophilia interesting on many levels because music has played a profound role in my life and because my background in psychology allowed me to understand most of what Sacks writes about. A working knowledge of basic neurology would be useful but is not necessary to appreciate and enjoy this book. One could potentially skip over the scientific portions and focus on the patients’ emotional experiences and still get the “flavor” of what this book is all about, but instead, I’d recommend keeping a dictionary/intro neurology text/website close at hand…why not learn something new?
Interesting book, though much of it is more strongly related to neuroscience than music. The thing is I was more interested in the sections where the connection to music was overshadowed by the neurology. The sections more strictly on topic had a tendency to
I probably would have liked this more if it was read by the author. Professional readers always sound clinical to me, like they're more interested in proper enunciation than what they're reading. When authors read their books they are much more engaged in the reading and the content comes more alive for me.
The case studies reported here describe how DIFFERENTLY music reaches us. (My husband and I hear music quite differently. He is a
Readers of "A Leg to Stand On" will recall the value of music to Sacks during his ordeal, and many who have heard him speak know he swims to music. It's not surprising that this book came from him.
One question I have that has never really been answered: why is there music? What drives
This book, dealing with the neurological impact of music, is a bit of a disappointment in several ways. The first that struck me is how much of a re-hash of his old books it is. He is constantly referring to cases covered (in much more detail, to be sure) in his previous books. As someone who has read them I found these reprises interesting, but only to a point. Far too much of the book is spent reviewing these and not really covering new ground, I can only imagine that for someone who has not read the referred works, reading this one might be very frustrating without the depth of background one gains from reading the more detailed account.
In Sacks' previous works, he puts the disparate pieces of the patients' stories together to paint a detailed and always sympathetic portrait of his subjects. Due I suspect to the terse nature of the retrospectives in this book, that never happens. To make matters worse, the last section of the book contains some anecdotes that suggest some of the conclusions he drew in the previous chapters may be incorrect, yet he does nothing to integrate these into the rest of the book. The reader is left with a collection of mostly unrelated anecdotes which Dr. Sacks does little if anything to integrate int a whole.
The book si not al bad. There are some new stories and even some of the old stories get some retrospective in light of new scientific data, and some of the analyses of composers and musicians are rewarding. These rewards are scattered throughout what, in the end, is a rather disjointed and scattershot book.
This was more alarming than I thought it would be. As a profoundly tone deaf person, sometimes I like reading things about music because it all seems so science fictiony to me. But when Oliver Sacks talks about it ... it's too weird having him describe ME in terms of
Grade: B
Recommended: I think more musical people might enjoy this, but overall, I don't think it's quite as successful as some of his other books, maybe because having perfect pitch doesn't seem as intriguing as mistaking your wife for a hat?
I am finding this book an amusing read, if only for the fascinating case studies, but as a lay scientist I'm getting a little lost in the brain terminology and not coming away with satisfying hypotheses about why these phenomena occur. I guess that's sort of
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